DCC #69 – The Emerald Enchanter

Posted on December 16, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

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by Joseph Goodman
Goodman Games
DCC Rpg
Level 2

Villagers have been disappearing—and some of them are your friends! A number of clues, various old superstitions, and a handful of vague omens point to the brooding citadel of the emerald enchanter. This silent monolith has sat undisturbed atop a windy ridge for centuries. Legends say that a green-skinned sorcerer dwells there, where he conducts strange experiments and builds enigmatic machinery. His emerald constructs patrol the grounds of his citadel, and he is seen only rarely when he ventures out on nefarious errands that end in horrid screams and strange lights coming from his citadel. Now you believe he is holding your friends captive. To rescue them—and potentially acquire some loot along the way—you set off to invade his inner sanctum …

This is an exploration of a wizards tower, with a skull, and emerald theming. It has all the usual charm of modern DCC adventures: unique monsters, a good homage to Appendix N encounters, and decent freaky shit. It falls short on the magic item front, resorting to (mostly) lame standard potions & scrolls. It’s got a decent map but suffers from from verbose text and the mundane bits seem out of place. Worth keeping.

The text in the publishers blurb is the only real background provided. There’s a short paragraph that could be called ‘a summary of the current situation inside the wizards fortress” but there’s no other backstory. Which is good. I hate backstory. I want to see text useful to me running the adventure not ancient history form 10,000 years ago that has no impact on the adventure. What WOULD be nice is a SLIGHTLY more detailed hook or locale. Two sentences about a couple of village NPC’s prisoners or three about a recent raid. That’s all; if done in the DCC style then there should be more than enough detail in those short descriptions to get the DM off and running with a good foundation to set the adventure in.

The encounters in the wizards fortress almost all harken back to those strong archetypes that somehow the hobby has moved away from. There is a weird portal table that things fly out of and that he party can leap through. What are those things? Why Emerald skulls with bat wings and red ruby eyes! Come on, how much more of an appeal to appendix N can you get? That is some great shit. It can be summarized quickly, provides great imagery in the DMs mind (which then should translate to them being able to create great imagery in the players minds as he translates and fills in the gaps) and has an instant “Oh Shit!’ coolness factor to anyone encountering it. What’s great about this adventure, and most of the modern crop of DCC product, is that manage to pull it off time and time again. A mural golem that pulls tiles from the walls. A chained demon in a salt pentagram. A mass of protoplasm with a great eye and pseudopods in a jail cell. Mummy’s heads and brains of ancient wizards who you can consult with. These encounters appeal to something ancient in me, almost like an ancestral memory of appendix N. All of those issues of Heavy Metal, Thieve’s World, and 60’s/70’s fantasy lit are still alive deep under all of my post-secondary analytical training, and these encounters appeal to them and dredge up those feelings … allowing me to instantly fill in the detail needed to bring the encounter to life.

The magic items in this adventure blow chunks. I’m used to seeing weird and unusual things from DCC, things that certainly did not come from any book. Instead we get potions of spider climbing and scrolls of light. Lame. As I type this, the spider potion could turn the characters limbs in to spider ones, which would be nice, or the light scroll could create a tiny star, also cool, but both of those would be better as one-time use objects WITH THAT ADDITIONAL FLAVOR TEXT instead of just another lame potion/scroll. Scrolls should be ancient magics (and there is an example of this in the adventure) while potions should have horrible flavor text associated with them … and NEITHER should in ANY way resemble ANYTHING EVER done for D&D. Ever. I paid my $9.99 (maybe plus tax, I got these at GenCon) and I want the extra detail of a non-book item dammit! I’m paying for YOUR imagination and for you to enable mine, not for a 1E DMG retread.

The text for the encounters is too long. There IS a lot going on in several of the rooms but still, too much text. I recall that Many Gates of the Gann had a lot going on as well but the rooms seemed much shorter. In this adventure Goodman falls in to the classic trap of starting a land war in Asia explaining things. Explanations suck. Explanations remove mystery. Explanations contribute to Wall of Text syndrome. The burning need to EXPLAIN things ruins D&D. If the toilet isn’t fun there shouldn’t be one. If the barracks are not fun then there should be one. It doesn’t matter “The Emerald Enchanter engages in many alchemical and magical experiments.” No shit Sherlock; that’s the basis of the entire adventure! That text adds NOTHING to the description of the laboratory room. If it were just one sentence it wouldn’t be bad but there’s multiple lines of what are essentially filler text about background, history, and the like. One day I’m going to learn something about the publishing business so I can call out the fuck with that doesn’t push back on this. Aeryn Rudel, the editor? Did YOU not push push back on Goodman? Was it your job to? Either way, the text ends up the adventure and there’s too much of it in the room, and the process repeats in the other rooms.

I wrote a lot of negative stuff up there but that shouldn’t dissuade you. While the adventure has its issues its overall good enough for me to keep … and that’s saying something because I have very high standards and keep only a VERY small percentage of what I review. Other publishers write better adventures but so far no other publisher has managed to consistently produce the high quality that the new DCC line is currently rolling out in they quantities they are doing. They are solidly producing B material are a fast rate, with some reaching A levels. B’s are no insult coming from me. Nice job Goodman Games!

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/103720/Dungeon-Crawl-Classics-69-The-Emerald-Enchanter?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 2, Reviews, The Best | 1 Comment

Dungeon Magazine #15

Posted on December 14, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

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The Wreck of the Shining Star
Richard W Emerich
AD&D
Levels 4-8

This is an empty little adventure on a ship wreck. Over three levels and about thirty rooms you encounter an octopus and an undead. The Rooms are devoid of anything interesting to play with and there’s hardly any interesting descriptive text. The adventure mostly consists of a list of what each room contains. Perhaps an adventure that actuaries might find interesting? There is one interesting thing in the adventure, a unique magic item, and it takes half a page to describe. Perhaps someone is trying too hard … and in the wrong ways?

In Pursuit of the Slayer
Carl Sargent
D&D
Levels 6-9

This is a case mystery. The party encounters the remains of a massacre and an obviously evil person. As they follow and chase him to bring him to justice they get information that the evil dude has been known as a good dude for a long time. It’s got a time based element so the longer the party dallies the harder the final fight is. It has some decent monsters from the Creature Catalog which mixes things up a bit … for a moment I thought there was some originality here. Bits of this are ok but it seems to telegraph its intentions well ahead of time.

The Dragon’s Gift
Thomas M. Kane
AD&D OA
Levels 2-7

I like a lot of the OA adventures in Dungeon, mostly because they have a strong fairy-tale like element. The Celestial Bureaucracy, talking animals and spirits that do more than just “Roll for init as they attack!” add the whimsical element that I am usually looking for. This is a bit of linear railroad, but a mostly enjoyable one with some great encounters. What do you do when you mean a giant along a narrow path, with no room for either to pass by? The “paperwork” trope which always seems so tiresome in most adventures with monster bureaucrats doesn’t seem out of place or forced. I suspect that you could mine Dungeon Magazine for OA encounters and sprinkle them throughout your own games and get a lot of the whimsical element that I look for. There’s a kind of enforced politeness in these because of the OA character classes/honor nonsense, but if you instead just see it as “you can talk to all the monsters” and VERY few things immediately attack, then you can see the attraction to adventures like this one. Maybe that’s because, even though it’s linear, the addition of the social elements provide the Choice critical to a good adventure. Oh, yeah, in this one you travel up a river to meet a water spirit who wants to give you some treasure. And he means it!

The Glass House
Wolfgang Baur
AD&D
Levels 4-6

I’m not sure what’s up with this one. It’s just a simple raid on a house that a giant inhabits. There’s a huge backstory with love, selkies, undead, and tragedy. None of which matters because the hacking is going to be short and sweet as the party cuts down the giant and his wolves. There’s are elements of the norse in this, with a frost man named Sigurd and a magic cauldron. With some good theming you might be able to salvage something here. MAYBE. If you set the guy up as some place the party had to go, complete with his lazy troll servants, and then added the tragic element to it later then the party would have a nice little quandary on their hands.

Roarwater Caves
Willie Walsh
AD&D
Levels 1-4

A decent adventure! In Dungeon! Woo Hoo! It all starts with a good name: Roarwater Caves. It’s a dungeon crawl/raid. I swear I like things are NOT dungeon crawls, but not in this issue. There this guy in town that’s buying fish from Xvarts nearby for a fraction of their value and undercutting the local fishermen. Lately his shipments have stopped because the Xvarts have been taken over by bugbears. The xvarts want him to find someone to come kill the bugbears. That’s a pretty decent set up. Monsters that are not psychotically evil, some good human natures stuff in there as well. There’s also a good end-game chaos play where a large band of kobolds raid the Xvarts as the players enter The Big Fight. Then a bunch more Xvarts from another faction show up, creating even more chaos! AND there’s a bunch of shit in the dungeon that the players can use to make things even more Chaotic. Sweet little set up. It’s supplemented by a GREAT rumor table that applies to the adventure and is not overly simplistic, some good rooms in the dungeon that are not straightforward, a great map with lots of elevation changes and pallisades/barricades, and the dungeon getting cut off by high tide … and ALL of this has some clues dropped around to let the players know what’s going on ahead of time. It’s got some good flavor as well, like a container of pitch dyed yellow (which explains the old xvart adage “as yellow as pitch.” It’s that sort of thing I get really excited about. Nice job. Worth grabbing. Oh, there’s a bunch of crappy shit I left out, like the Xvarts double-crossing the players. That’s lame. The players need to learn to love again and reinforcing the Kill Em All attitude because of a double-cross is uncool. There is a cute section that has the xvarts detaining the players ‘for medical reasons.’ which is a nice jab.

The Elephants Graveyard
David Howery
AD&D
Levels 5-7

This is an isle of Dread clone, maybe mashed up with the old Source of Nile bookkeeping game. Go on a jungle adventure with pack animals, encounter hostile cannibals and natives, find the lost valley and collect loot, then explore the ruined temple with some Indian Jones traps thrown in. It seems mostly like an exercise in tedious bookkeeping as you manage your pack animals load, supplies for your porters, and the bullshit disease and heat rules from WSG which do NOTHING to add fun to the game.You might be able to lift the hook. Imagine lots of copies of a fake treasure map going around town, being sold to suckers. Except one sage KNOWS its not fake, or part of it isn’t anyway, and hires a group of Tomb Raiders. I like the hidden knowledge aspect of that as well as the ‘wagon train of idiots’ that could happen because of it, ala Gone Fishin’!

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 18 Comments

SNS4 – The Mires of Mourning

Posted on December 11, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

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by Greg A. Vaughn & Kevin Wright
Frog God Games
Swords & Wizardry
Level 6

Adventurers are needed for a simple job: escort a catatonic prisoner of value to the Crown to a sanitarium where he can be safely held for treatment. What could be easier? But the sanitarium lies at the heart of the Creeping Mire, and it’s the rainy season. No patrols or contacts have been able to get through in weeks. What dangers await along the Swamp Road, and why don’t they want the prisoner to reach the sanitarium? And why does the sanitarium staff want the adventurers to place the prisoner in their care and leave as quickly as possible? What secrets are held within the mute man’s head that some would kill for…or worse?

Oh boy, a Pathfinder conversion with a plot! And a bajillion word backstory! And lame ass treasure and NPC descriptions! I can’t wait!

Backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory escort some dude to an asylum in a swamp. On the way you get attacked by some generic giant mosquitos and a small band of bugbears. Both of these, as well as the wandering monster table, are good illustrations of what is wrong with adventure writing. There is a great deal of text present in these two lead-in encounters on the way to the main adventure … but very little text to actually help the DM. The swamp teems with these blood-sucking brutes. They come in the rainy season. Not commonly know, they prefer to feed on the wild garbunzo, of which there are none in the nearest 500 parsec area. Most remain under dry branches during the rainy season and so many die of starvation. What the fuck? There’s NOTHING in that that helps me run the damn encounter. There’s no flavor, just bland history and ecology. Hey! You! With the face! THE PURPOSE OF YOUR WRITING THE FUCKING ADVENTURE IS TO HELP THE DM RUN IT! Not to illustrate why your great american novel can’t get any response from a publisher. Let me help you with that one. YOUR WRITING SUCKS! That doesn’t really matter here, because you’re not writing me a novel. Your writing a fucking adventure. Tailor your writing to its purpose!

The party gets to the asylum and drops the dude off. They are invited to stay the night, during which the place is attacked by a mixed band of bugbears and dragon, which free a bunch of deranged inmates, and a general chaos ensues. Danger Wil Robinson! Danger! PLOT PLOT PLOT! The point of this is to free the prisoner, kill the asylum keeper (but not before he can reveal the 99 page backstory to the players with his dying breath(s)) and give the players a trail to follow to the next lameness. Almost no one here has a personality. There’s a brief mention of the orderlies and servants, but just in brief with very little character to them. Perhaps the only good part is that the entire asylum room key is one one page. This is smart. The characters are only going to be here a short while and the purpose of the map is to run the NPC encounters (which don’t really exist in this adventure) and run the nighttime raid. It’s PERFECT for that. Short, terse, just enough detail (little more than room names and a sentence) to let the DM run the night raid. THAT’S what I mean when I say I want the writing and content targeted at the DM. THAT helps me run the damn thing at the table. It’s still lame. After all the build up the raid is little more than “a dragon and N bugbears attack and nuke the NW tower.” I’m used to seeing little vignettes in these things, where the party encounters something, etc. Some ideas to use and spring on the players would have been nice. After all, that’s what we’re paying for, the imagination. Instead it’s nothing more than “they attack and the dying curator vomits forth the length backstory.”

The characters are expected the follow the retreating monsters through the swamp to find the backstory inmate, and get access to the The Black Ward and the treasures within. This is total bullshit since the monsters combined lair really nothing more than a wide-spot in the swamps with a note that says “hey, go back to the asylum to find The Black Ward.” The Black Ward, with all its build-up, then consists of seven linear rooms. There is exactly one interesting thing in: The Brothers Shank, a pair of ghouls with a nice backstory that provide a great deal of inspiration on how to run ghoul encounters. Are they alive & depraved or just undead? The Where the Fallen Jarls Sleep and its sequels, the treatment of the undead as The Unknown rather than “its just a zombie” provides the sort of inspiration I AM looking for in an adventure.

The treasure here is almost the worst I have ever seen. The worst I’ve ever seen is “put in as much as you thin is appropriate” while this adventure frequently turns to “treasures worth 946gp, 7364SP and 2673CP.” Again, we’re paying YOU, the fucking moron who wrote this adventure, for the detail of the treasure. Fuck you and fuck the Story/Plot mentality that, inevitably, is used to justify this sort of fraud.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/112796/Saturday-Night-Special-4-The-Mires-of-Mourning–Swords-and-Wizardry-Edition?1892600

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DCC #67 – Sailors on the Starless Sea

Posted on December 9, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

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by Harley Stroh
Goodman Games
DCC RPG
Level 0 Funnel

Since time immemorial you and your people have toiled in the shadow of the cyclopean ruins. Of mysterious origins and the source of many a superstition, they have always been considered a secret best left unknown by the folk of your hamlet. But now something stirs beneath the crumbling blocks. Beastmen howl in the night and your fellow villagers are snatched from their beds. With no heroes to defend you, who will rise to stand against the encircling darkness? The secrets of Chaos are yours to unearth, but at what cost to sanity or soul?

This may be the first or second adventure for the DCC RPG … and it shows. It has all of the elements that make a DCC adventure great but they are not yet fully formed. As a result we see an adventure that captures the spirit of DCC but doesn’t always present well.

While there’s background there’s not really a coherent introduction. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Anyway, there’s history but no real defining moment for the players to get involved. The back cover blurb may offer the best description with its “beastmen howl in the night and snatch villagers from their bed. With no heroes to defend you …” and you’re off! There is a nice little rumor table to go with things but mot much more than that which could be useful.

The ruined keep has several entrances and a couple of features to check out. That’s a great thing to include. There’s not just a front door, but places in the wall to break through, walls to climb, and so forth. Working with the DM to support these sort of non-railroady play style is one of the reason why I like these open-ended locations. [And yes, I feel that Far Cry 1 & Far Cry 3 are FAR superior to HL2 & D3 for this very reason. Fuck your story HL2! I want open world gameplay!] Things degenerate a bit as the ‘Starless Sea’ is reached as it moves in to a more linear design, but, like I said, it’s an early adventure. The DCC guys all seem to skew this way anyway, from Curtis & Stroh to Goodman. You can see it in the early, suck ass, old DCC line and you can see shades of it here.

I like the encounters. There’s a good variety of weird shit, creatures, and hazards to fill the time before you die. In particular I like the way Harley adds a bit of color to each one. This additional color does WONDERS to help invoke certain imagery in the DM, which in turn helps them communicate that feel to the players. There are ragged banners, and a section where the players must snap the fingers off of an icy corpse to free the ax it grips. As usual I feel my own writing does little to communicate that to my readers. That’s the case with many of the best designers so you’l have to trust me: the imagery Harley conjures is powerful stuff, cementing pictures in your mind. The creatures here are a mix of ‘Beastmen’ and a few others, like tar ooze and corpses on animated vines. What I love about this is that it is reminiscent of classic monsters, both fro D&D and from myth, but they have that OD&D weirdness factor to them. Monsters tend to be unique in DCC and that unique feel is captured in every encounter, up through a nice table of ‘random weird-ass and scary beastman attributes.” I like.

The encounters ARE a bit lengthy at times. My eyes glazed over more than once. While certainly features stand out (the awful act of breaking fingers to get a treasure ax) there is A LOT of text in many of the encounters. The key to successful writing for an adventure is for it to be short enough, with enough imagery, for the DM to refer to it instantly, or for it to be so memorable that you never have to read it again. (“Old Bay, the crab loving Hill Giant”, is all I need to remember.) This fails on both of those points in several places.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/102448/Dungeon-Crawl-Classics-67-Sailors-on-the-Starless-Sea?1892600

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Dungeon Magazine #14

Posted on December 7, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

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I missed my update last weekend. My wife & her friends were cosplaying My Little Pony at a local con and I was Discord. I know no one gives a shit but I’m bored after blowing out my gutters.
Masqueraider
Randy Maxwell
AD&D
Levels 2-5

This is a small wilderness adventure followed by a short cave. It’s set up as a kind of mystery. Something weird is going on, and either a bear, owlbear, or giant spider is attacking locals. The party hunts it down to a cave system. The introduction and wilderness area has hints of nice things: a cute ranch theme, rival parties, soldiers and others to ump for rumors. These could use some more work but generally have a seed of something good, especially when taken as a whole. The wilderness encounters, while having too much text (which was the style at the time … did I mention this one also wears an onion on its belt?) are not that bad either. Flies on dead ponies, a horde of newly hatched giant ticks, and some herders, for example. These offer some pretty good variety. The cave lair has a similar problem/feature: LOTS of text with some decent nuggets buried inside. There’s a nice dead adventurer party scattered throughout, along with their banner. The banner is a good example of little bits that add substance and style. The adventure is not awesome but the extra little bits are nice. There may be enough to make this one worth checking out.
A Question of Balance
by Nigel D. Findley
AD&D
Levels 8-12

One Encounter Wonder. The party sees an earth insurance salesman getting burned at the stake and has to free him from the villagers and then go kill The Other Thing that came through the time vortex with him. Which is one fight. That’s not interesting. There’s some pretty lame expository text to communicate The Balance to the party.

 

Stranded on the Baron’s Island
by Willie Walsh
AD&D
Levels 4-6

Country House Murder, except its a theft and the party is shipwrecked. (No Murder Hobo would be caught dead sailing; the ships are always wrecking.) Lots of people with things to hide and quirky behavior, so lots of red herrings. Nice use of a mimic & doppleganger which is mostly wasted in this thing. The NPC’s are strong, but the formatting suffers: its arranged like a location based adventure instead of a social adventure. A HEAVY edit could save this. Which would be a lot of work.
Master of Puppets
by Carl Sargent
AD&D
Levels 6-8

Uh … dungeon crawl with a duel-class 11Monk/14MU running ahead of you launching set pieces. It’s hard to see this as a level 6-8 adventure, there are A LOT of tough encounters here for that level and the entire thing is mostly linear. Room 1 then room 2 then room 3 and so on. The bad guy starts running around in front of you, dumping attacks at you while jumping through the door to the next room. It’s got a cute spot where animals get dropped from a great height and go splat on the party, but that kind of fun is not representative of the adventure. it’s just a set up full of set pieces.
Phantasm Chasm
by Erik Kjerland
AD&D
Levels 5-7

Another one encounter wonder. Except one hit wonders were good. The party gets ambushed by bugbears and illusionists in a dead-end gully. Ooooo! They are disguised! By illusions! *BLEEEECH*

 

The Wererats of Relfren
by Grant Boucher & Kurt Wenz
D&D
Levels 3-6

A weird little village/town adventure that is mostly event based. The party wanders around, stuff happens, and hopefully the party investigates. It can end with a giant wererat attack during a village festival. There’s a very weird section where the party is arrested and jailed. Resisting turns the entire peasant population against the party and turns then in to outlaws. And then the party is rescued. All of this is done so the party can dress up in costumes for The Big Reveal: the big costume party in the village where the wererats rip off their masks to reveal themselves and attack! All that railroading. I hate that shit.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 3 Comments

Hall of Bones

Posted on December 4, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

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by Bill Webb
Frog God Games
Swords & Wizardry
Level 1

Frog God Games is pleased to present a short handling of our rule set, game theory and a short adventure of the award winning SWORDS & WIZARDRY game. The game is similar to very old school editions of the game, dating back to 1974. This was the game that came in a small brown (and later white) box, when men were men and well, henchmen were cannon fodder. What you will find herein is a ready-to-play adventure that can be run with only a few minutes of preparation.

This is a very short and mostly linear introductory D&D adventure. The designer does a decent job presenting several classic monsters in some interesting situations well worth ripping off. I somehow have the impression that this adventure sells D&D short though and I can’t quite place my finger on why.

Let’s play a game How about … D&D! No, instead I choose to play “Second guess the successful publisher.” This adventure is 20 pages long, only four of which contain adventure content. Five if you count the dungeon map. The first nine pages contain a rules summary and the same self-congratulatory Primer on Old School that was included in the MCMLXXV introductory adventure. I thought that Primer was condescending and grog when I reviewed that product. Now that I’ve had some time to think on it and reread it in this I still think it’s insulting and preachy. I can understand trying to explain to 3tards and 4orons that they are about to play a fundamentally different game and they should NOT think of it as D&D … because that will cause them to bring in their 3e & 4e play styles. This is a pretty fundamental problem, I find, with people entrenched in 3e & 4e. Deaths runs rampant until they figure out they are not playing D&D. They are playing something else. Of course, telling them that this is the REAL D&D and they haven’t actually been playing D&D isn’t going to be productive and gets back to that preachy, insulting style that infects the advice section in this adventure. Including the basic rules for S&W is an interesting choice. It’s not really clear to me that there’s enough here to allow a beginner to play D&D. Smarter choices, like NOT including the bullshit short story about the hireling, who’s never mentioned again and instead including a play example, may have been wiser. Ahhh, armchair quarterbacking, much harder before the advent of the ARPANET.

The dungeon map is almost entirely linear. I’ve noticed that this is something that many of the big designers fall back to. Webb does this. Curtis falls back to this. I don’t like it. I’ve been playing D&D for quite some time and I STILL get freaked out when faced with The Unknown areas of a map. I vividly recall playing a D&D game recently in which I felt utterly and completely lost in the dungeon. We weren’t; we had a good map and were not in that far, but there were several passages and stairways we had passed by. There was this overwhelming feeling of the unknown that I felt surrounded by. That’s the sort of feeling that a non-linear map invokes. That’s the sort of feeling that I wish the map in this adventure did.

The encounters here are a strange mix of the mundane and the interesting. There’s a chapel room that just has some boring old giant rats in it. This is in contrast to a ghoul room, full of junk, that has a recently eaten pig carcass in it. That’s a lot more interesting, although it;s just window dressing. We can compare this to the spider cavern, an excellent room. The great cavern is full of giant spiders, at least 60. There’s an iron cage 20′ from the entrance. Entering it finds the floor made of bricks. Pull up the bricks discovers a tunnel to a similar cage on the other side of the room … a hidden tunnel to pass through the room. That’s the kind of encounter I’m looking for. The giant rats bring nothing. The ghouls bring a little flavor text. The spider room brings the noise. Overwhelming odds. A kind of puzzle to get through it … it’s the kind of encounter that causes characters to bring blankets, chickens, and bags of flour in to the dungeon. IE: Perfect.

The creatures here are mostly just book monsters although the boss is non-tradiitonal, and therefore good. I wish more adventures would use non-traditional monsters. One of the things that drives me nuts are skeletons that have some sort of turn resistance. “They wear amulets that give them a 1HD more for turn attempts” may be the original offender, but “the area is super evil” and “your gods can’t reach here” are other pretexts that I loathe. Instead of making up some nonsense why not instead make up a new monster? I know the difference seems small but there seems to be something important here in practice. The players are confronted with something new. They don’t know what to expect, what the special attacks or defenses of the creature are. Does it level drain? The PLAYERS are terrified. In contrast, when a traditional monster shows up and then acts in a different way this somehow seems unfair. The rules are being changed under the players. The treasure here suffers from a related problem. BOOK ITEMS are boring. “+1 hammer” is not a magic item that excites anyone to find. Contrast this to a cat statue that turns in to a cat that grants someone good luck. That’s interesting and delivers on the promise that published adventurers implicitly make: This is new & interesting and worth your time/money.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/117475/Hall-of-Bones?1892600

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DCC68 – The People of the Pit

Posted on December 2, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

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by Joseph Goodman
Goodman Games
DCC RPG
Level 1

It has been years since the last virgin was sacrificed; and now the pit beast awakens once more! Every generation it stumbles forth on undulating tentacles from its resting place deep below the great ravine, its towering blubbery mass ravaging the land before returning to slumber for decades. But this time is different. The Great Beast strikes with intelligence; bands of faceless gray-robed men emerge from the tenebrous depths, herding the beast’s roaming tentacles before them. The enigmatic people of the pit live despite the passage of ages! The earth shakes each night as they herd the primordial tentacles even further, while the villagers ask: is any man brave enough to put the sword to this menace?

This is an actual dungeoncrawl. through an old temple/cave system. There are four levels and maybe … 60 rooms? It has the usual elements of a DCC adventure: unique creatures and (mostly) strange magic items in weird environments that encourage the DCC awesome system. It’s got a good mix of encounter types, including some that can’t be overcome by a first level group. My reviews of the new DCC line have been haphazard, but so far I don’t think I’ve found any of them that outright suck and most are pretty good. This one continues the goodness.

There’s a great rift in the earth, a mighty chasm hundreds of miles long. Every century or so a great mass of tentacles erupts and ravages the countryside, killing many. A religious order began organizing virgin sacrifices every decade in order to stave off the massive century assaults, but the cult has now been driven off and the tentacles begin to stir while strange cultists have been seen in their vicinity. Someone must put the cultists to the sword and solve the problem once and for all.

I sometimes find it hard to review products and this is one of those cases. I don’t know why, but it tends to cause short reviews. The content here is good and the encounters have a decent amount of variety. Bottomless pits, slippery steps, single-file areas, broken causeways, rope ladders, sliding stone alters and, of course, lots and lots of tentacles. Tentacles as eye candy. Tentacles as enemies. Tentacles as obstacles. Tentacles as Allies. Tentacles as boons. If you like tentacles then this is the adventure for you. A great number of the enemies have some kind of tentacle aspect, the most common being the cultists. They come in various types with various levels of tentacle-ness. Special bonus: when you kill them a mass of tentacles erupt from their carcasses and attack again! They run around doing nicely iconic cultist things like swaying back and forth summoning/controlling tentacles, sacrificing people, and backstabbing. Pretty good portrayal of a cultists. There are some other creatures as well and I want to single one out: a basilisk. This is a basilisk in name only, and perhaps in spirit. It crawls up walls, and then paralyzes with it’s gaze, slowing turning the person to stone after a number of rounds. This is a nice classic monster with a decent twist that allows it to be used in a first level adventure without it seeming like the DM is purposefully gimping the monster for the parties benefit. Oh, and it has a golden horn on its head. NICE! I LOVE it when a monster is seriously powerful and has an OBVIOUS treasure. Nothing quite says “push the big red button” to the party quite like that set up. “They giant is super nice … but man, did you see the size of that ruby he’s carrying?!”

The treasures are a bit hit and miss. The golden horn thing is a great example of a wonderful treasure. It’s obviously valuable and a great temptation for the party. There’s also a couple of other nice treasures, like a red glass wand with strange powers that is found in a nicely themed room. And then there’s crap like “+1 mace.” Come on guys, you can do better than that. The entire DCC experience is about being awesome and then you put in a generic +1 mace? Lame.

Anyway. Strong adventure and worth having.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/102637/Dungeon-Crawl-Classics-68-People-of-the-Pit?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 1, Reviews, The Best | 1 Comment

ONS6 – Curse of Shadowhold

Posted on November 27, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

ons6

by Alexandra Pitchford
Frog God Games
Swords & Wizardry
Level 10

The Haunted Woods has stood for centuries on the edge of the Western Frontier, with the rough-and-tumble town of Nerimar serving as gateway to the unknown dangers of the wild. When a battered, lone elven ranger comes to town seeking adventurers willing to brave the depths of the shadowed wood where even his people refuse to go, there must be dire trouble indeed. From the ill-starred elven village of Golden Oak to the haunted halls of Shadowhold, it is up to a band of heroes to release the elves and their home from a curse that has spanned thousands of years and to finally shed the light of day on a terrible secret just as old.

This “adventure” involves a small adventure in an old ruin to kill a great evil. It’s very sparsely populated and offers very little in actual content. It does have a nice theme going on which may be worth stealing to expand on or attach to a different adventure. What that means is that the scenery around the outside has potential but the meat is not there. This feels like a Pathfinder conversion.

There’s a whole lot of lead in to the actual adventure portion. You and your name-level buddies are walking around the streets one night when you see an elf getting beat up and then the thugs, a bunch of 7th level toughs, attack you. The elf wants your help back in his village in the Haunted Woods. You fight a pack of shadow wolves that can’t be avoided and then make it to the village where the elder tells you to go find some missing elves who disappeared near the old ancient ruins. Do you know how many PC’s have died in my OSR game before making level 3? I think one guy has gone through like five so far and another guy has gone through four and I’m pretty much a softy DM. To have a bunch of 7th level thieves/toughs running around a frontier town is absurd. Follow that with: why are the party of name-level people i the town to begin with? The whole thing is set up wrong. This is what I mean by it likely being a Pathfinder conversion. This kind of nonsense is typical in 3.5/Pathfinder/4E games but the OSR side of the house is all predicated on low power levels. 8th level shopkeepers ain’t in the cards.

The ruins have fourteen room over three levels in a mostly uninteresting layout. I counted four monsters and maybe one or two traps. That doesn’t stop the excess read-aloud or DM text of course; it takes a whole lot of words to tell the players and the DM that the room is empty. The big monster at the end does, of course, have a soliloquy to give so that the designers cool backstory can be revealed. Lame. Despite the sparseness of the rooms and the extreme verbosity there are a couple of nice details that stand out. There’s great weird crystal room, a trap of course, that you could lift for your own weird dungeon. There’s also a nice description or two about shadows (the Shadow Plane plays an oblique role in the adventure backstory.) In one room the shadows play weird games around a statues feet, dancing and moving. That’s going to weird out the players and make them VERY cautious. It’s not a creature encounter or a trap but just window dressing. EXCELLENT window dressing. Ih the final boss fight there’s a mirror that can be covered up with a cloak. There’s a great description of how the cloak/cloth clings to the mirror, as if by vacuum suction. Again, that’s a great description that creatures very evocative imagery in the DMs mind … the first step in enabling the DM to do the same for the players. The monsters and treasure are nothing more than standard by the book stuff, with nothing interesting going on. The mundane treasure is terrible “$1500 gp in miscellaneous jewelry.” Gee, thanks for the effort there Alexandra … if it wouldn’t be too much trouble perhaps you could supply and adjective or adverb there, or maybe even a couple of nouns … after all THATS WHAT WERE PAYING FOR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ok, on to the nice part. As I was reading the backstory and the conclusion to the adventure I came up with something better. The published thing is all about elves, civil war, dark woods, sacrifices o a demon and strife when the sacrifices are discovered. It’s ok but could be far better. Let’s imagine a bright wood. Elves live inside of it. The wood slowly turns evil (whatever that means) but the immortal elves are too attached to their home to leave. Maybe at some level they know what is going on but the slow crawl of evil takes place over millennia and thus the elves are never really faced with a turning point. They cling to their ancient ways, mostly by habit and maybe a bit consciously, trying to force a way of life that they should no longer have. A kind of weariness pervades the setting. Unknown to all, the guy in charge is sacrificing (people, animals, whatever) to the Great Shadow in the middle in order for his people to be able to cling to their way of life. The woods have an evil and haunted reputation and either no one knows elves live there or they have an alien reputation. One eventually stumbles out of the woods in to civilization, completely out of time as if from a lost tribe, begging for help. Now THAT would be a pretty cool set up. You can thank this adventure for leading to that, since I’ve stolen liberally from it to describe the setting. 🙂

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/113120/One-Night-Stands–Curse-of-Shadowhold–Swords–Wizardry-Edition?1892600

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DCC #72 – Beyond the Black Gate

Posted on November 25, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

72

by Harley Stroh
Goodman Games
DCC RPG
Level 5 Characters

Summoned by a coven of foul witches, the adventurers are bid through the Black Gate and across the multiverse, in pursuit of the crown of the fallen Horned King. There, in the icebound gloom of Thrice-Tenth Kingdom, they must pit their wits and brawn against his dread servants. His sullen citadel looms above the darksome woods and elfin ice caves, ruling over the mystic kingdom. Do you dare to ascend the throne of bones and declare yourself master of the Wild Hunt? Whatever your answer, the land beyond the Black Gate is sure to present a grim challenge for the even the hardiest of adventurers!

This adventure has the party raiding a lair full of frost giants. The hook, while well done, is a railroad. The end of the adventure is giant battle royale, also a railroad. The thing is packed full of flavor though, and includes some great scenes as well as some great patrons, spells, etc. The overall quality of these DCC RPG adventures seems to be much higher than the told DCC line, in keeping with the goals of the DCC RPG. I think I’m giving a backhanded compliment. While the adventure has issues and is a little small, it does provide opportunities for great play, which is really the goal of any published adventure.

The players are shipwrecked. Their choice is climb the sea cliffs or journey through the sea caves below, a decision that must be made in a instant before they are swept back out to sea. They eventually end up in a coven of witches who task them with freeing their patron, The Horned King, from the thrall the Ice Giants daughter has over him so the Wild Hunt may once more run wild over the dem-iplanes! That’s the hook. It may be the firs 25% of the adventure also. It’s nice to see the hook integrated in to the adventure. Even though there’s a railroad shipwreck and there’s a railroad ‘quest’ (you get transported to the Horned Kings plane even if you slaughter the witches) it’s still REALLy well done. The entire hook section is only six encounter long but does a GREAT job of setting up a feel. I’m not even sure I have the words to describe what that feel is. A well of bones, sea caves full of torture implements and irons maidens rusted shut from the sea water killing those inside. Outside a fallen chapel the area is FULL of animals, just standing there, who part like the red sea to let the players pass to get inside. Inside is the Witch’s Sabbath. OMG! This is so bad ass! It is at times like this that I fail my readers. I have no ability to communicate the awesome descriptions that Harley uses to transfer the vibe form him and his words to the DM who has to run the thing. Long time readers know that this is one of the things I value most in an adventure. The purpose of the adventure is for the writer to communicate the vibe and feel to the DM to they can instantly grasp it and fill the details. When you read it and your mind races, filling with the imagery, then you know the designer has done a good job. Harley has done a good job with the opening, railroady or not. The whole Witches Sabbath, Horned King, Wild Hunt shit preys on your soul, dredging up everything you’ve ever read or seen related to those themes. I don’t believe in that ancestral memory crap, but it’s certainly the case that these classic tropes are powerful ones and very well presented. The classics are, in general, appealed to too often and they get old. Except when someone masterful touches them and reminds you why they are the classics. Harley does that here.

Enough gushing! On to the main adventure! Oh … wait … it’s good also. There’s an excellent opening scene with a dead giant bear, it’s head missing and a GIANT spear lodged in it. Sweet imagery! There are multiple ways in to the fortress, for clever PC’s at least. One of them has two giants bullying a third in to facing the party alone, with a fight on an icy drawbridge. There must be at least a half-dozen awesome thing set up in this one encounter. Bullying giants, icy bridge, drawbridge being raised, alarms to be raised … if your players don’t do something awesome here, or at least attempt it, then you REALLy need a new group of players … your old ones don’t know how to have fun. Inside is the usual assortment of sleeping giants, ice toads, etc, that we are familiar with from the old G series. It’s like a mash up of G1 (one of my all time favorite adventure locales) with the creatures from G2 (significantly weaker, IMO.) Mixed in with this is some foul and weird shit, like the Shrine of the White Worm. It has an egg .. with an incredibly potent yolk. This one encounter is straight out of the every Appendix N thing you have ever read where you partake of a forbidden and powerful substance. REALLY good stuff. The end of the adventure has the party meeting the Horned King, weakened on his throneIf freed from the enthrallment of the giants he rises and calls out, poetically, for the Wild Hunt to ride once more. That’s nice but it’s not the nicest part of the scene. The designer has given him about 5 hp in his current state. This just BEGS for the guy to rise up and give the mighty call to assemble the hunt! Only to then be stabbed ignominiously in the gut by a PC and immediately killed. Now THAT is bad ass adventure writing! Who the fuck is this adventure about?!! It’s about the PC’s motherfucker! not some bullshit power tripping fantasy that the DM has over their campaign world and how awesome a big of a virtual penis the DM has in creating the Horned King and the Wild Hunt. Yeah Mr DM? How about I just stab your cool ass NPC in the gut? Game Over Man! Harley did this earlier in the adventure also. When the party is confronted by the assembled masses of witches in their Sabbath, when they are charged with freeing or killing their patron the Horned King, once option is for the party to lay in to them and massacre the coven. Nice! I’ve seen over and over again how other writers deal with this shit. 27th level GISH orphan protectors, unkillable NPC’s, gimping the party and so on. None of that nonsense here! While the designer has railroaded the party in to the adventure he’s NOT dictated that the party has to be good guys or mildly accept their fate. Nice Job!

The new Harley Stroh now join the ranks of David Bowman, Matt Finch, and Gabor Lux as MUST BUYs. is there name attached? Buy it. And since only he & Finch seems to be currently producing work … that must mean he’s either #1 or #2 in the ranks of current adventure designers.

And yes, Harley, I should just hit cmd-q now.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/105619/Dungeon-Crawl-Classics-72-Beyond-the-Black-Gate?1892600

Posted in Level 5, Reviews, The Best | 1 Comment

Dungeon Magazine #13

Posted on November 23, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

d13

More than one thing to salvage from this issue! A decent adventure starts, an early Dungeon Dozen follows, and the then things go RAPIDLY downhill. Until a good, last, adventure appears.

The Ruins of Nol-Daer
by Howard L. McClesky
AD&D
Levels 5-8

This is that most rare of things: a good Dungeon Magazine adventure. It’s a three level abandoned/ruined keep now inhabited by a motley assortment of creatures that … and get this … all make sense together. I don’t mean they are fire giants with hell hounds or some such. There is a wide variety of creatures here and their reason for being here, working together or not, seems … realistic? There’s a page or so of bullshit introduction/background that is completely worthless but once past it you get a decently tight adventure, at least for the time it was written in. It’s got some great hooks that are short and yet integrate well in to the adventure. In fact, that’s a good summary. The adventure is full of things that are NOT throw away and fit in well. It has a certain internal logic. The ruined keep has impacted the countryside and there are a variety of places around it that have suffered. Missing livestock, a mining camp having trouble, bandits having trouble when making camp … these backgrounds, rumors, and real events all fit in very naturally. The adventure proper has a great map of a ruined keep and the encounters are full of real gamble material. A tumble down courtyard has a description that centers round the impact of it being tumble down. A monster hides in a room astral projecting … just go ahead and kill it. There’s a NICE magic ring that talks to the party and tries to get them to take it with them. Each of the encounters center around not just some bullshit victorian cataloging of the room contents but in how the players can interact with it or in how he DM can use it to interact with the players. Arrow slits might have things behind them, etc. that the DM can use to increase the players paranoia. That kind of practical advice to use in =actually running the game is what sets this apart from the vast majority of dreck.

Going Once… Gointg Twice
by Patricia Nead Elrod
AD&D
Any Level

This isn’t really an adventure, it’s more of a seed. An old wizard is retiring and moving and he’s auctioning off his stuff. The “adventure” consists of a couple of NPC descriptions and a list of 24 things being auctioned off. It’s positioned as a way for the DM to relive the party of some cash. Lame. However, if you just take the items up for auction and sprinkle them in to your campaign as treasure, replacing he lame ass shit that published adventures usually give out, then you’d have some decent treasures. Kind of like an early version of the most excellent Dozen Dozen (the best current D&D blog.) The fact that this POS takes up five pages is a tragedy, but I guess they have to differentiate themselves from a simple Dragon magazine list.

The Moor-Tomb Map
by Jon Bailey
AD&D
Levels 2-4

This is a short overland journey to an island with an old wizards tomb on it that is currently inhabited by bandits. Five of the adventure pages are devoted to the starting town, so it’s probably supposed to be a springboard to other adventures as well as a home base. From that standpoint it’s not terrible; there are a decent number of NPC’s running around although they don’t really interact with each other. The organization here will require a lot of note taking and rereading to allow the DM to run the village well; a typical village flaw that isn’t helped by the verbosity of this era. The overland adventure has only seven encounters. These are of varying quality. The first has a wolfwere and his six wolf buddies (concealed perfectly quietly in a crate) tricking the party and ambushing them. The lack of blood, six QUIET wolves fitting in a crate, and the absurdity of the set up ruin an otherwise classic “broken down wagon” trope. There’s a bridge ambush where a couple of turn-coat hirelings attack the party. I like the general aspect but I don’t like the way its done here. Even though there are bandits as a feature of the adventure this ambush has the hirelings in league with six lizard men. A little arbitrary … it seems like making this a rival bandit gang, hoping to join up with the main one, or ANY replacement of the lizardmen with humans, would be better. The last overland bit has a giant obelisk to be climbed to get a clue by looking through prisms. That’s a nice classic element. It’s ruined by the wizard having sprinkled clues on top to help the party … loot his tomb? Really? Ug. I hate that shit. THIS IS NOT A TEST! THE PART ARE GRAVE ROBBERS! The tomb is a tomb, and not bad by those standards. Traps, undead, etc. The bandit portion is a fake fishing village … a little far-fetched, I think. Maybe much better if it WERE a fishing village, dominated by the bandits.

The Treasure Vault of Kasil
by Patrick Goshtigian & Nick Kopsinis
AD&D
Levels 5-7

There vault/ruins are well known in the area and there’s a small village at the base of the mountain the ruins are on. I really like the idea of a small out of the way village, pretty peaceful, with a local tourist attraction nearby to go visit. There’s A LOT of possibilities in that which, are, unfortunately, not taken advantage of.Hucksters, wary mothers, people with dreams, guides … a lot of lost possibilities. The adventure proper is just five or death death traps straight out of Grimtooth … but a LOT more complicated. Ah, for those halcyon years of Jr High D&D play …

Of Nests & Nations
by Randy Maxwell
D&D
Levels 8-12

Uh .. I don’t know how to describe this one. Arson, rioting, sabotage, murder … and no suspects. That’s the tagline and I guess it’s a decent description. Specularum is having trouble Murdered guards, conjured monsters, etc, have the town in chaos. There are riots in the streets and every faction in the town is tossing about accusations and at each others throats. ALL HAIL DISCORDIA! “The duke and his advisors are very concerned over the growing unrest in the city.” Yeah? No shit Sherlock. The bulk of the adventure is an investigation. Events will happen on certain days and the party will follow-up and meet people and do things until finally either figuring out who’s behind it all and/or being targeted for elimination. There are A LOT of events. There’s is a decent amount of ancillary data to help the DM runs things. A handy table for mob action, for example! There are a decent number of one-liner comments that can lead to more flavor … the underworkld meets at Black Lilly’s bar … just a sentence or two is what we get but you immediately get the picture of a kind of no-man land, or neutral zone meeting ground so the underbelly can conduct business with hated rivals, if need be. The alien nature of the invader is nicely done and, while a little forced (of look, it has exactly the magic item it needs!) I think it comes across well enough. If you read this a couple of times and photocopy and cut out and make notes and expand on NPC’s (a lot of Speak with Dead possibilities and thus a need for the dead to threaten, worry, and embellish and the DM to be prepared for that) then you’d have a decent adventure. So, basically, this is an adventure outline. A GOOD adventure outline. But like all outlines you need to do work to bring it to life.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 4 Comments